Eastern London Garages to Transit Systems Group, an Australian Transport operator.

The eastern London
garages, Lea Interchange (10 routes pvr 183), along with Atlas Road (Harlesden) (4 routes pvr 99) and
Westbourne Park (4 routes pvr 70). Dagenham (16 routes
pvr 84) stays with First and will be run by their Essex operation. This will soon reduce to around 3 routes operating from Dagenham after recent tender losses to Stagecoach.

They have to keep this depot so they can bid for the TFL rail
replacement contracts as TFL only
give these contracts to operators who have TFL routes.

A varied mix of
vehicles both single and double-deck, conventional diesel and hybrid
are involved. Whilst Metroline already have a selection of ADL and
Volvo type in their fleet. First have lots of ADL, Dennis,
TransBus and Volvo type and a small number of Scania.

It remains to be seen
how the First operations will be absorbed into the respective
companies, but suspect that there will be some shuffling around of
vehicle type and allocation to garages in the future. In the
meantime, as all London operated buses are basically the same all over
red livery, it should not take long to change the fleetnames and
legal letterings on the respective vehicles.

Metroline drivers and
engineers should not have much of a problem driving and dealing with
the vehicles, as they are much the same as already in the fleet,
apart that is probably the SN-class Scania OmniCity double-deckers.
However that said, they do already have their own small fleet of
Scania/East Lancs Olympus type.

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